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One of my favourite apps is Kindle for Mac, but if you’re doing any kind of research or study, the fact that you can only have one book open at a time can be a serious impediment to your workflow. Here’s a few ways round this:

1. Kindle Cloud Reader
Probably the easiest and most effective solution is to read your second book in Safari by way of the Kindle Cloud Reader. Go to read.amazon.com and get set up in moments with a few simple steps.

2. Calibre.app.
Another good choice, particularly if you’re not always wired to the net, is to get Calibre (an open-source e-reader). You can use this app to copy all your Kindle content into a format that Calibre can read, allowing you to have Kindle open on one desktop and Calibre on another. If any of your Kindle books are DRM’d (i.e., have software protections that mean they will only open in Kindle), use this free resource to un-DRM them.

3. Fast User Switching
My least favourite solution, but if 1. or 2. don’t appeal to you, set up a new user on your mac and register your Kindle for Mac app to that account also. This is a useful solution if the internet is unavailable or you are not comfortable with removing DRM on your Kindle purchases. The downside is that it’s slow and can be awkward to keep simultaneous notes (one solution here is to enable Dropbox on both user accounts, and save your notes in a file in your Dropbox).🙂